Reality Hunger Research Articles

“The texture of et cetera” — Synchronizing with the Blurry Real in 21st Century Artists’ Novels (Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Kate Zambreno)

Whether it is in the wake of a “Return to the Real” in visual arts” (Foster 1996), of “Reality Hunger” (Shields 2010), a number of novelists of the third millennium have shown an ever growing interest in accommodating the forms of the real into their fictions. For a certain category of novels, the fascination for the real translates into considerable changes brought to the novel’s inherent relation with time. As shown by Peter Boxall, the speed and instantaneity that are specific to our 21st century seems to be counterbalanced in a certain number of novels by an infinite attention to the slow passing moments of our everyday reality (2013, 1–18). This article focuses on three novels that revisit the forms of the Künstlerroman in the 21st century (Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 2011; Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, 2012; Kate Zambreno, Drifts, 2020) and looks at the strategies used by their narrators to grasp the elusive nature of the transient real while in the process redefining the novel as a site where to explore formal possibilities rather than as a set of generic constraints.

Autofiction, Autotheory, and the Neoliberal Contemporary

Autofiction, Autotheory, and the Neoliberal Contemporary Marc Farrant (bio) Autofiction, as the name suggests, is a genre that occupies a hybrid space between autobiography and fiction. Any reading that aims to be attentive to this hybridity must necessarily take into account the possibility of oscillation at any moment, the need to make constant adjustments, to process and decipher what is presented as truthful as potentially fiction, and to enjoy the fictional as ostensibly factual. In other words, the reader of autofiction must be attentive to irony. The genre is uniquely suited to framing the broader relationship between literature and neoliberalism. Existing between two poles, one is tempted to suggest that autofiction resembles analogously the chiastic neoliberal imperative of self-fashioning: not only to fictionalize the facts (how we present ourselves online), but to live the fiction (how we exist online). Given the genre’s increasing popularity since the millennium (akin to that of the memoir), this affinity appears more than merely analogous. Is autofiction symptomatic of a creeping neoliberalism in both reading public and wider culture? This neoliberal turn would hinge on the privileging of individualism, on the totalization of the market as the exclusive field of all social relations, and perhaps on a concomitant exculpatory logic that privileges identity at the expense of critique. Indeed, for Walter Benn Michaels, in a 2011 chapter “Model Minorities and the Minority Model,” the neoliberal novel makes “the central problems of American society a matter of identity instead of a matter of money.” The price we have paid for diversity on the surface is the impossibility of redistribution at the foundations. Yet is this symptomatic reading enough to exhaust the ironic potential of autofiction, to see this irony—much as David Foster Wallace viewed television—as yet another capitulation of the avant-garde to the logic of advertising and commodification? This short essay revisits Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, a seminal text both of our contemporary and its prehistory (in the 1990s), as a way of situating autofiction, and the related subgenre of autotheory, as neither wholly symptomatic nor free but as a way of thinking through the problem of critique in (and of) the contemporary. [End Page 63] One of the genre’s most celebrated practitioners, Ben Lerner, has remarked that the autofictional enterprise is inherently paradoxical: on the one hand, the writer-self can be accused of narcissism by drawing too readily on the resources of one’s own life—in other words, oversharing. On the other hand, this subjective focus rescinds omniscience, the possibility of absolute vision. The contemporary popularity of autofiction feeds on this paradox and is anticipated by Kraus’s autofictional novel, which documents a hunger for subjectivity free from textuality while also anticipating a broader saturation of poststructuralist assertions that emphasize hybridity, irony, and collapsed borders (in this regard, autofiction might be seen as the quintessential genre form of post-truth). Kraus’s avowedly feminist piece, which lays the groundwork for writers like Sheila Heti and Jenny Offill (not to mention the autofictional aesthetics of recent TV shows Fleabag and Girls), is constructed on the fault line between authenticity and deconstruction. A performative manifestation of the feminist credo that the “personal is political,” Kraus’s onomastic narrator-protagonist rails against “serious” fiction: “The ‘serious’ contemporary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy.” Forgoing the transcendental imperative to fictionalize, Kraus’s epistolary novel schizophrenically dramatizes the relation of art and life, reveling in a reappropriated sense of female abjection that renders the binary of art/life and, more importantly, fiction/nonfiction, insignificant. “For years I tried to write but the compromises of my life made it impossible to inhabit a position. And ‘who’ ‘am’ ‘I’? Embracing you & failure’s changed all that ’cause now I know I’m no one. And there’s a lot to say . . .” Since 1997, the hunger for authenticity has grown in correspondence with the diminishing efficacy of the avant-garde (see David Shield’s Reality Hunger) and critical or deconstructive theory (see Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique). There is a tendency to equate the defanging of theory with...

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Living Reality Right

Living Reality Right

The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

The CounterText Interview: David Shields. Ten Years of Reality Hunger

The <i>CounterText</i> Interview: David Shields. Ten Years of <i>Reality Hunger</i>

The Story of an Anthology: “Conjunctures in a Disjunctive Society?”

It is said that in the years 2000 + 20, literature has rejected depth for surface; at least in ‘New World’ societies of shallow tradition. From the United States, we hear that the sign of the times is “reality hunger”, an aesthetic not of exploration, but of affect; a structure not of intricate plot, but of plotlessness; of facts that eclipse imagination.If serious fiction is outsold by nonfiction, genre fiction and self-help books, what might be ‘fiction's response’? I turn to the minority form of the fictional repertoire – poetry – to ask: might poetry suggest a contract between fiction's response and the society?

The Rise of the Fragmentary Essay-Novel: Towards a Poetics and Contextualization of an Emerging Hybrid Genre in the Digital Age

Abstract This contribution introduces the ‘fragmentary essay-novel’ in terms of an emerging hybrid genre within the experimental branch of contemporary Anglophone literature. Reading David Shields’s manifesto Reality Hunger (2010) as a poetics which literally ‘essays’ a “path for the novel” (Smith 2008: n. pag.) in the early 21st-century, it also discusses Tom McCarthy’s recent work Satin Island (2015) as a prime representative of the fragmentary essay-novel. Both Shields’s and McCarthy’s texts are contextualized and framed as aesthetic responses to the digital age, especially to the implications that processes of digitization have for our shifting understanding of ‘reality’, ‘authenticity’, ‘literature’, ‘reading’, and ‘authorship’. Special attention will be given to the question of how the organization of knowledge in digital networks affects the epistemological situation of the novelist and the human individual. In addition to putting the essay-novel on the map of contemporary fiction, we aim to raise awareness of the tradition and general significance of this unduly neglected genre.

What do avatars want?

This article references the ‘pictorial’ and ‘affective’ turns in theory in order to discern ‘what avatars want’, a play on the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell’s ideas. By arguing that what avatars want is really what we want, I propose that ‘truth’ or ‘real’ has very little to do with how we feel about our avatar creations. So putting aside whether we want to suggest that an avatar is ‘alive’, their existence reveals our desires, yearnings, fears and insecurities. I concentrate on the intricacies of reading the avatar as an animated, performed image and our desire to inject it with subjectivity, while at the same time thinking of it as an object. The avatar entity need not be proven ‘real’ or ‘alive’ for us to feel it is. We have a ‘reality hunger’, as suggested by the writer David Shields, which needs to be fed with objects that seem sentient and brimming with emotions.

Trollism, Reality Hunger, and Vulnerability. Trolls in film and literature in the 2000’s

Abstract Trolls have become increasingly salient in contemporary Nordic film and literature. This article sets up to understand the dissemination of cinematic and literary trolls of the 2000’s by providing a comparative analysis of three contemporary texts: the Norwegian mockumentary Trollhunter (André Øvredal, 2010) and two fantasy novels, Troll: A Love Story by Finnish writer Johanna Sinisalo (2000) and Stallo by Swedish author Stefan Spjut (2012). In addition to comparing contemporary trolls to more established troll conceptualizations from Nordic folklore and children’s literature, I will also analyze trolls in a larger cultural and socio-political context by tying them to aesthetic movements such as the reality hunger in contemporary Scandinavian art and the vulnerability of the contemporary socio-political moment.

A ‘non’ that became a yes: David Shields’ Reality Hunger and the punk germ in the new literary nonfiction

Abstract In his literary manifesto Reality Hunger, David Shields refers to an emerging movement of ‘reality-based art’ whose characteristics include ‘a deliberate unartiness, “raw” material, seemingly unprocessed, unfiltered, uncensored, and unprofessional […] Randomness, openness to accident and serendipity, spontaneity; artistic risk, emotional urgency and intensity’. This grab-bag of anti-art processes and aesthetics is part of an ‘as-yet-unstated’ contemporary literary mood urgently needed, Shields argues, to refresh the moribund star-machine that is literary culture. In its ‘hunger’ for something more ‘real’ in literature, Shields’ manifesto speaks clearly to punk sensibilities without ever saying ‘punk’. This article will trace the unstated affinity between Reality Hunger and punk processes, aesthetics and attitude, and in the process uncover an angry punk germ in the burgeoning movement of contemporary nonfiction writing to which Reality Hunger speaks directly. In doing so, it will contribute a new strand of enquiry to the question of how we understand and define punk literature, opening these questions onto the territory of literary nonfiction.

David Shields's Lyrical Essay: The Dream of a Genre-Free Memoir, or Beyond the Paradox

In 2010, David Shields published Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, a text in which he makes the case for memoirs against the more classical forms of autobiography, arguing notably that you can only write one autobiography while you can write multiple memoirs, “though coming at your life from different angles.” He echoes Doubrovksy's original definition of “autofiction” (circa 1977), a concept meant to allow autobiographical writings to enter the postmodern era, unburdened by the readers' referential expectations. Then, in 2013, Shields published what can bee seen as a case study, a work matching the criteria presented in Reality Hunger. Indeed, How Literature Saved my Life purports to be both “confessional criticism” and “anthropological autobiography.” Does the case study live up to the theory? Does Shields's own memoir overcome the obvious limits of the French autofiction and shed a new light on the process of remembering one's life? This article explores whether it is really possible, as suggested by Shields, to jettison the referential issue and move beyond the classical frames of autobiography and fiction?

“And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation

A & Q 73 psychoanalytic turn in Asian studies is not a reduction of, but rather a return to, an epistēmē of Asia. Meera Lee is assistant professor of Asian/Asian American studies in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at Syracuse University. 6 notes I have taken the term imaginary ethnography from the works of literary critic and psychoanalytic theorist Gabriele Schwab. 1. For a more detailed discussion of psychoanalysis’s transformation, see Oliver (2004, xiii). 2. The notion of “colonizing ratio” appears in the concluding part of Foucault’s (1970) The Order of Things. For an expanded account of “colonizing ratio” and “countertransference,” see also Lambert (2013), who explained the cultural imaginary between a literary critic and the stranger. 6 works Cited Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Translated by Les Mots et les choses. New York: Vintage Books. Lambert, Gregg. 2013. “Strangers, Analysts, and Literary Critics: On the ‘Unhappy’ Marriage of Psychoanalysis and Ethnology.” Keynote address presented at the Affect, Politics, Psychoanalysis: International Conference, National Taiwan University. Oliver, Kelly. 2004. The Colonization of Psychic Space: A Psychoanalytic Social Theory of Oppression. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Schwab, Gabriele. 2012. Imaginary Ethnographies: Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity. New York: Columbia University Press. “And Yet the Body Is His Book”: Articles of Incorporation Haun Saussy The three questions the editors ask are an invitation to Bovaryism, the lure of the lives one hasn’t lived—in Emma Bovary’s case, a poisonous enchantment. Who, in the literary profession, has not felt that lure? Like the rhapsode in Plato’s dialogue Ion, we know all about war, shipbuilding , economics, law, medicine, not from direct practical experience but 74 A & Q by being plunged into the representations of them all. And, because we read the dialogue well enough to see that it is a prolonged send-up of the self-satisfied rhapsode, we often think we ought to have gone into one of those fields that would teach us how to get our hands around something more substantial than a representation. Julie Stone Peters’s (2005) wonderful essay about interdisciplinary envy tells us what happens when we directly confront the objects of our professional “reality hunger”: the practical professionals in law, too, think of their field as overly technical , formal, distanced from reality, and look to us literature specialists to restore the living, breathing, bleeding texture of experience through our magical art. Something similar would probably happen on the other side of whatever interdisciplinary fence you chose. When I think about what “fields or subfields outside my current area of expertise” I could and should have gone into while I had the chance, it is not with the regret of having done the wrong things with the last twenty-five years of my life. I say this at the risk of sounding selfsatisfied . There are languages I should have learned (Russian, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Turkish, Portuguese) and reasons why I should have learned them: to plunge into Acmeist poetry, Chekhov and Formalist criticism; to consider the Vedas and the epics from close up; to understand another huge, multicultural, early empire; to have a handle on Central Asia as it impinges on China and Europe; to read Pessoa; and other reasons I can’t imagine before getting involved in those languages and the paths to which they might lead. That is how languages are. To learn a language is to start on a long-term relationship. In the unlikely event that I could show up (mirror, mirror on the wall) at my first squirrel-infested attic apartment in New Haven in 1983 to speak with my earlier self, the advice I’d want to give would be mainly about personal and sentimental matters—which are outside the scope of this article. About the things of the mind, here’s roughly what I’d say: “Soak up all of that good deconstruction stuff you can—it’s not going to be around forever. Learn a lot of classical philology, because, as you’re already surmising, that’s where the tools of deconstruction were first forged. Take some classes on philosophy with the professional philosophers , despite the flashes of antagonism occupying...

Anybodies: The Fact, The Fiction and The Make-Believe of Referencing

David Shields' Reality Hunger (2010) is a collage of ideas; sources are not included to illustrate the notion that ideas are not owned. His approach, dynamic and performative, also creates a denial of the body (as symbol, as imagined author). This essay explores the relationship between text and body by considering how we, as readers and writers, might consider an author's or other artist's body to be. Whether we imagine it to be the literal form, which we might not know and have no experience of, or something more metaphorical. Work by authors that explores the notion of body is examined and used to consider how we can understand the body of an author as something solid but subject to constant change and interpretation. The body, then, becomes a place of fiction and non-fiction; referencing too becomes both an act of fictionalising and making real another author's body.

A screenwriter’s Reality hunger

A screenwriter’s <i>Reality hunger</i>

So, What Should Academic Critics be Doing, on the Edge of the Now – Skimming the Surface or Plumbing Those Depths?

How and where should critics – especially scholars of South African writing – be channelling their energies in a digital age in which the conditions of cultural production have shifted profoundly not only in content but also in the very media of representation? Does the migration from depth-charged literary books to the surface-surfeit of screens involve more than just a change in technology, but also an altered scale of literary-cultural value? This article takes up the public invitation by critic Sarah Nuttall to enter into discussion on precisely these questions, in her various recent articulations about ‘the way we read now’. The article rejoins Nuttall's usefully provocative argument about whether or not ‘the reach of the literary has been receding rather than growing in recent years’, and looks critically at the counter-valorization of ‘surface’ and ‘reality hunger’, incorporating a predisposition towards affect in preference to acts of ‘symptomatic reading’ in the mould of Freud, Marx, Althusser and Jameson. The argument is then routed through a reading of Ivan Vladisavić's novel, Double Negative (2010), suggesting that not only does this work of fiction do what Nuttall suggests the ‘literary’ cannot do, or is not doing, namely capturing the surface real and its engagement with ‘reality hunger’, but it also uses – as its fictional substrate – a complex play with ‘surfaces’ of the real, and their representations, as part of its novelistic objective, which ultimately subsumes the ‘surface real’ in ways that such a category cannot, in turn, do to literature.

Information sampling and linking: Reality Hunger and the digital knowledge commons

This article weaves together insights from the social sciences and humanities to explore the link between Web 2.0 technology, information diffusion, and what we describe as a ‘hunger for reality’. Using David Shield's book Reality Hunger as both a critical muse and analytic lens, we explore linkages between form and meaning in the digital age. We suggest that Shields' central argument in Reality Hunger accurately reflects the way new information technologies have altered information production, distribution, and meaning. As a result of opportunities created by Web 2.0 technology, information today is increasingly ‘sampled’, rather than digested in whole. Information consumption comes in bits and bytes, fragmented and disconnected from original sources; it is repurposed in ways that increasingly valorise creativity over content, social networks over corporations, and collective knowledge over private intellectual property. In this article, we explore the social consequences of this new reality. In particular, we argue that individuals are no longer merely consumers of information; through social networks, they are increasingly both producers and distributors of information in the digital age, satisfying their own hunger to define reality. Through the use of Web 2.0 technology, ordinary people around the world are creating a new digital knowledge commons. We explore the implications of this new knowledge commons for the future and suggest reasons that new forms of reality hunger are likely to emerge.

“In a Country where You couldn’t Make this Shit up”?: Literary Non‐Fiction in South Africa

In the last few years, several critics have suggested that the most significant contemporary writing in South Africa is emerging in non-fictional modes. The work of authors like Antony Altbeker, Antjie Krog, Jonny Steinberg and Ivan Vladislavić ‘almost convinces one’, in the words of one acclaimed novelist, ‘that fiction has become redundant in this country’. This piece sets out to ask why such claims are being made now, and what they can tell us about the status of the literary in contemporary South Africa. From Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism (1973)to J. M. Coetzee’s ‘The Novel Today’ (1988) – and, more recently, David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) – the relation between ambitious non-fiction and the serious novel has often been portrayed as one of antagonism and rivalry. Yet while not wanting to dismantle the different kinds of truth-claim made by fictive and documentary modes, I suggest that instances of fiction and non-fiction from South Africa have in fact for a long time been in an unusually intense, intimate and one might even say constitutive dialogue with each other. Offering a survey of how various critics have tried to conceptualise the space of the literary in South Africa – whether as ‘field’, ‘archipelago’, ‘dream topography’, ‘marketplace’ or ‘seam’ – the piece argues for the need to read novels, poems, plays and other traditionally ‘literary’ forms alongside more topical, documentary modes. I deepen these lines of enquiry by examining two encounters: the first a panel on non-fiction at the 2010 Cape Town International Book Fair (from which the chapter takes its name), and the second a revealing reading, or as I will argue, misreading, of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace by the acclaimed non-fiction writer Jonny Steinberg.

Reality hunger: a manifesto

Reality Hunger questions every assumption we ever made about art, the novel, journalism, poetry, film, TV, rap, stand-up, graffiti, sampling, plagiarism, writing, and reading. In seeking to tear up the old culture in search of something new and more authentic, it is the most vital book of the new century.

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Book Review| August 01 2010 Reality Hunger: A Manifesto Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields. Wendy Rowlings Wendy Rowlings Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction (2010) 12 (2): 167–170. https://doi.org/10.2307/41939081 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Wendy Rowlings; Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 1 August 2010; 12 (2): 167–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41939081 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressFourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 Michigan State Univeristy Board of Trustees2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: FULL-LENGTH REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.